It had to happen sooner or later, the litigation happy group known as the RIAA has sued Usenet.com

Attached is a PDF of the complaint where all the lastyness is laid out for us to see. Of course the complaint takes some liberal uses of available text and content.

Shall usenet prevail? Usenet has been around longer than the world wide web, and way longer than any lame file sharing company has even though of being a business model.

So why should the attempt fail? At first glace it seems like the RIAA is blaming usenet.com for the way usenet works. They claim that they (usenet.com) have organized usenet into categories that are “open and notorious about their purpose”. And yet we all know any joe schmoe can create a usenet group. In fact I have those instructions right here on this blog.

The RIAA also states that “Defendant selects the newsgroups to offer to its subscribers” and the last I knew, which I’ll admit has been a while, usenet.com carries every live group available and has not “chosen” any group, but rather has chosen to carry the a full newsfeed of all available groups.

The suit also claims “Defendant has the right and ability to supervise and control the infringing activities” which usenet.com does not do. By “moderating” usenet groups they would open themselves up to further issues if any infringing materials were not removed. By not moderating they can (and do) act upon complaints when they are received. To moderate would put them in the position of checking copyright for each and every article posted which would be a mammoth task considering usenet, on Oct 17 2007, has a daily feed of ten million articles daily.

There is a lot more that I could write about, but the beginnings of the RIAA complaint are fraught with misconceptions about usenet and how a usenet provider operates.

So what about Common Carrier status? A common carrier is described as “company that holds itself out to the public for hire to provide communications transmission service”. Now “Common carriers have an obligation to provide service to any and all comers, except where service is clearly being used for illegal purposes.” but since Usenet.com does not police their network they are not aware if their network is used for illegal purposes. I’m sure they have received thousands of notices to remove infringing works and I’m sure they do remove them.

That is how Usenet.com and the rest of the usenet world have set their business models to help protect themselves. By being a common carrier they receive protections from certain laws.

Whether the RIAA sees things this way or not is a different matter.

One thing that does come to mind however from being in the usenet business for a number of years is the extreme lack of good companies that police usenet and send off take down notices.

Sure there’s a few around that overcharge their clients like Universal and Sony BMG but they are so ineffective it hurts. I won’t get into those details here but the main point is that these companies charge tens of thousands ofdollars a month and never make a dent in usenet piracy.

I think that’s what this claim may be about. The RIAA has been ineffective due to their partners lack of usenet knowledge and experience that they decided to after the provider itself.

Good luck Jerry, if you need anything just give me a call.

The complaint can be download here

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 10:55 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.